


Like an Echo

by ScriveSpinster



Category: Sunless Skies
Genre: Body Horror, Character Death, Extra Treat, Ghosts, Mutiny, Nightmares, Other, POV Second Person, Star-Madness, Steampunk Airships Are Always Haunted By The Ghosts Of Their Previous Captains, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 15:20:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20293630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: You learn to make your own peace with the apparitions out here.





	Like an Echo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aphoticdepths](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aphoticdepths/gifts).

> The character death tag refers to previous sky-captains who become ghosts, and it's not particularly graphic.

You spoke to Captain Whitlock once, briefly, when she was still alive and you were only an engineer's apprentice. 

You'd woken in the night from dreams of strange lights and intricate geometries, and when you tried to close your eyes again, you could see vast wheels turning in the darkness, made of gold and fire. You'd pulled on your coat and made for the engine room, thinking vaguely that if your head was full of maths and machinery, you might as well get some use of it. You had ideas for a few improvements – odd dream-logic changes, rearrangement of components to approximate an alphabet you'd only learned later. You're not convinced, in retrospect, that your ideas wouldn't have led to incineration. But Whitlock was pacing the darkened hall on the way, and she saw you, and called you to the galley for tea and toast instead. You weren't sure you wanted either, but company, the flicker of lamplight and the sound of another human voice, was welcome.

“You learn to make your own peace with the apparitions out here,” she'd told you, as you spooned extra jam onto crisp brown bread and tried not to notice how tired she looked. “You're not the only one, you know, who sees things in your dreams.”

“What do you see, then?” An impertinent question to ask a captain, when you were barely even crew, but Whitlock had never stood too much on formality, and the dim-lit solitude of the galley seemed to grant an equality that didn't hold in daytime hours. In any case, it was hard to be deferential to someone who was currently crunching through their second helping of toast and marmalade, and she didn't seem offended. 

“Someone outside, following along behind us. A dead man. Lonely.” She laughed, a little sadly. “Stands to reason, I suppose, with where we're headed. And no, before you ask, I'm not planning on looking back.”

She sounded so sure of herself, but her grip on the teacup was tight, and it occurred to you that hers was the kind of bravery that had less of madness to it than desperation. Whatever she wanted in the Blue Kingdom, she wanted it more than her own life, and before you could stop it, another impertinent question slipped from your mouth.

“Are you afraid to die?”

“Well,” she said, “nobody knows what's beyond Death's Door, do they? Could be horrible. Could be beautiful.”

“Could be both,” you said. Your tea had grown cold, and your toast was dry, too sweet and unpleasantly heavy in your stomach; you didn't like the thought of a door that everyone went into and no one ever came out of, and you didn't like speculating on what might wait there for anyone you cared about. “I hope you're not making plans to find out.”

“Maybe I won't,” she said. “Maybe I never will. You've heard the legends, haven't you, about captains and ships? I like to think that this old girl has a prior claim on me.”

You'd heard those folktales, yes, as every skyfarer and dock rat surely has. You hadn't believed them. You wouldn't think to doubt them, now.

.

The Orphean's second captain was a man who dreamed himself to death and took a few of his crew with him. 

He'd been a good officer, when he had Captain Whitlock to steady him, but he didn't take well to her loss. Turned paranoid, quiet and angry by turns, spent a long time looking out at the sky in search of something looking back. _Stars'll do that,_ a grey-haired signaler said, when she was sure there was no one there to listen. _Get in your head, they will. Make you believe things. You got to be careful of stars._

You'd only just been promoted to full engineer, and only then because the one who used to do your job died in the Blue Kingdom. You didn't know much yet about the things that stars would do, out of curiosity or because they didn’t care enough to notice. But you did know enough to say nothing when the Captain started to bundle himself in coats and wrap his arms in bandages, and to keep your head down when his eyes passed over you at breakfast and he muttered darkly about the watching sky.

You were there, the day he claimed that your supervisor in the engine room was a spy for the Reach's dead sun. You remember his grip on her arm, the open escape hatch, the wind whipping through. You'd been close, but not close enough – fast, but not fast enough – to keep him from stepping backwards and falling.

The skies took them both, but he left his mark on the locomotive before he went. Eyes everywhere, you found, when you went looking – scrawled across the walls and floor of the captain's cabin, inked on the pages of his books, carved into his furniture. There are still a few smudged lines of chalk on the wall beside the viewport where he must have turned his telescope, and whenever you look in that direction, they seem to stare back at you, sclera and iris and pupil. The captain who succeeded him never got the crew to clean it off, and you've never managed it yourself – because it's stubborn in a way that chalk shouldn't be, and it won't scrub away. Because anyone who tries comes back complaining that their application of soapy water and elbow grease was making something angry.

_I was here,_ that crude sketch seems to say. _I see you. You won't erase every trace of me._

You sleep in that cabin now, even though the memories don't always make it easy. Neither does the fact that you share the room with something restless and afraid. You can hear the tread of his heavy footsteps through the halls at night, and sometimes you feel his glowering presence at the foot of your bed, or following behind you as you go about your duties. More often, he waits by the viewport, keeping a steady watch against something too huge to comprehend or defy, striving to defy it all the same. You're sure that if you called out, he would call back, but what you would say if he did, you don't know.

_I know you're here,_ maybe. _I know you don't want anyone staring. I won't try to wash you away._

Not _I forgive you._ You haven't. You can't. But the skies have left you with nightmares of your own, and you understand him better now. So you rise, when you wake at night with your head full of memories and every stray whisper telling you that you're not who you should be, and you stand where he would have stood, feeling the cabin's atmosphere change like the pressure before a storm. Outside the hull, the wind keens and the stars shine too brightly, and it scares you, the thought of them out there and you so fragile and small.

You are not yourself. Your fingertips are stained with rust, your body flawed and flaking, and you know that if you had ever dared to look the Orphean's second captain in the eye, he would have given you to the Wilderness without hesitation. But you can tell from the weight in the air that he's here at his vigil, and there's a sort of kinship in waiting beside him that has nothing to do with forgiveness. You lay your glassy, translucent palm against the cold stained glass, beside the Judgment's eye, and know that you're not alone. 

.

The third. You regret the third.

They were a gentle soul in a peculiar body – slender, spidery, with pale eyes and too many fingers and wispy white hair as fine as cornsilk. When they cried, their palms bled silver. You know this because you found them grieving, once, for the loss of a crewman on a failed salvage mission, and when you took their hands and uncurled their clenched fingers, their skin and sleeves were wet with something that looked like mercury. You didn't flinch from the eyes that blinked open there, blue-grey as Worlebury's roiling mist and more delicate than the ones on their face. You didn't demand to know what they were, if the answer wasn't _human_. You bandaged their palms and swore to keep their secret, and you fell a little bit in love with them that day, though you never said anything about it. Few captains care so much about the lives of those who serve beneath them. But few captains are so driven.

_Axile,_ was the word that was always on their tongue: a lost place, a half-remembered home where lightning chased lightning across singing skies. You used to bring them tea and listen to them speak of the things they saw in dreams – the songs they heard, the ocean and the storms, the ponderous spiny creatures that dwelt without sorrow beneath the waters. 

It was out there somewhere, they told you – but _out there somewhere_ meant weeks in darkness with diminishing supplies and furniture burned for fuel. It meant the claws of scrive spinsters scraping along the hull in search of the scraps of maps your captain had stolen, their shrieks cracking the windows as you fled, and in the end, what it meant was leaving Eleutheria behind and striking out into the greater night beyond.

There's nothing out there, in the gaps between Judgments' domains, but killing cold and haunting winds and the hulks of locomotives who ventured out before you. You passed through the ruins of palaces, sigil-scarred and built to a scale far beyond human, where emptiness was a force unto itself and even the locomotive's running lights seemed an imposition. A waste of fuel, too – so you cut them out, and flew through darkness until it seemed that darkness was the only thing left in the world. You kept morale up among the crew with sky-shanties, dice games judiciously lost and stories of the place you hoped to find, but you kept an eye on your instruments too, tracking distance traveled against supplies remaining. You knew how soon it would be before you'd gone too far for returning.

_Turn back,_ you told them, more than once. The stores still held enough bread and vegetables to make it to Achlys port, a little thinner but all alive. You begged them, in the end, took their quicksilver-stained hands in yours and pleaded – and they shook their head in regret, but all they would say is that they knew where they had to go now, and the Orphean would be pressing on.

You were afraid. You hadn't known what else to do, except gather the crew, and gather weapons, and do what was needed to survive. You realized even then that they’d never surrender.

Your captain bled silver, too, when a panicking stoker drew the knife across their throat – but you made it to Achlys with half a crate of fuel to spare, a little thinner, all of you alive except for one. You wept when you saw the torchlight, knowing you were safe, and again when they called you _Captain_ and you couldn't deny it. There was no will or testament, only a skyfarer's death. The crew had deferred to you on the long way back, and so the Orphean became yours, along with her ghosts.

You save someone's life, the saying goes, and you become responsible for all they are. Take their life, and you become responsible for what they could have been: the deeds undone, the stories unwritten, the home that won't ever be found. There are times when you stand at the viewport and wonder whether lost Axile truly is out there, and if your captain truly knew the way – if they could have reached it, had you only trusted them a little further.

You haven't forgiven yourself. You can't. But one evening, when you unfurled an unlicensed chart across the table, you got the sense of something standing close behind you – a quiet presence leaning down to look over your shoulder at stars and sky-routes, and the uncharted spaces between. It seemed that if you turned your head fast enough, you would see them there, limned in silver, pure as starshine. If you touched them, they would be only as solid as a soul ever is, bereft of body, but they would be real.

You didn't look. You didn't move. You hadn't the right.

“I'm sorry,” you said, and something brushed your shoulder, cobweb-light. It would have been easier if they were angry.

“What can I do?” you asked, though your voice hurt with the effort of speech. You thought the answer would be _nothing_, damning and absolute, but a wind shook the room, a rebuke more eloquent than speech, overturning the inkwell and obliterating Eleutheria's heart in a pool of black. Ink ran in rivulets, converging to a single trail that flowed past Achlys town, past the defunct Relay and off the edge of the map. From there, no directions held except one: onward.

_Of course,_ you thought. _Of course._

“One day,” you told them. “I'll take you there.”

Another gust of wind, unsettling the papers on your desk and the photographs on your walls, and then your captain was gone, leaving you with a pool of drying ink and a foolish, impulsive promise.

And you've been collecting unfulfilled promises like Curators collect their treasures, but that one stuck in your mind. You find yourself keeping that ink-stained chart under lock and key, buried at the bottom of a chest, except on nights when you pull it out and run your fingers along the path you agreed to travel, wondering where it will lead you and when you'll finally go.

Not yet. You have a living crew to look out for, and promises or not, they come first. But one day – you don't know how you know this, but you do – there will be only you and your exiled dreamer, and Captain Whitlock, and the man with the eyes. And the Orphean, of course, faithful companion that she is. You won't need her forever, but it seems wrong to leave her behind.

.

Some nights, you hear the second captain's footsteps tracing a circuit around your cabin, heavy as oncoming war. Some nights, the tapping of Captain Whitlock's walking stick echoes down the halls, and if you strain your ears and quiet your breathing, you can catch the faint thread of her singing.

And one night, when you close your eyes and curl in on yourself, afraid of the fragile peeling paper of your skin and the radiance lurking beneath it, you feel the mattress sink under a weight beside you.

What touches your face isn't the warmth of a human hand, but something more like light, cool as water. Your mouth is dry, and you long to drink, but you know better, because you know _them_. You don't open your eyes, but you uncurl, relax, feeling the phantom touch of their many-jointed fingers winding through yours, their lips pressed to the back of your neck, the fluid strangeness of ghostly tendrils twining about your legs from behind.

You don't know if this is what your captain truly was in life, beneath the surface of their skin, or only what they wanted to be. You don't know if they've forgiven you, or they're only lonely. But you feel the cool trace of a tentacle slip across your chest, curling and questing, and another one wrap around your upper thigh, and you wonder if a ghost can feel – if they ache as you do, when you part your legs to let them in, if they shiver as they engulf you.

Your fingers clench. Your breath escapes. Light bleeds through the cracks in your skin. A filament glides across your parted lips, and you let your tongue flick out to taste something luminous. Your mind is full of wheels within wheels, turning in darkness, but your body is _here,_ subsumed by mist and anchored by the tendrils coiled around your wrists, your tensing thighs and trembling stomach, holding every piece of you together. Their chest is pressed against your back, incongruously human; something writhes inside you, or many somethings, shifting and half-substantial, and it's the easiest thing to let your hips roll with their ocean rhythm. You turn your head, and they kiss your mouth – salt and mist, light bending through water. 

Climax hits you in a building wave, carries you like a reed on a river. For one blinding moment, mind and body are indivisible – and when that moment recedes, you are fragile again, a small dark creature in a vast dark sea, and your captain is there at your back, wrapping you up in memory. 

You drift to sleep on calmer waters, untroubled by dreams, and when you wake, your flesh is only flesh – not cracked glass, not light. You know your name and your history, and everything you still need to do.

.

Sooner than you'd like, you're heading for the Blue Kingdom again, off to pull the shade of a Bleak Industrialist's lover back from the brink, and it's no surprise to find yourself speaking once more to Captain Whitlock, these long years dead.

You're aware that you might be dreaming, though it's hard to say whether that makes much difference to ghosts, and you're aware that dreams are not always so separate from waking as one might hope. 

Regardless, you're in the captain's cabin, the room that still feels like hers instead of yours, and you sit facing her across a small, plain table. Instead of tea and toast, a grail sits between you, filled with something bright and flickering. You reach for it – _moonlight floods the room, a swelling tide of silver washing everything clean_ – and find yourself stayed by her uncompromising grip on your wrist. Her hand is hot enough to sear. Her eyes are hollow and charred. Crackling fire burns behind her teeth.

“You'd best be careful,” she says. “Some powers aren't kind to those that challenge them. Others aren't kind to those who serve.”

She's a sharp woman, Amelia Whitlock, and never one to trust in those who rule, or those who mean to. You're glad she's here, and not beyond. You still don't want to think about what waits there.

“Is it the Sapphir'd King you're afraid of?” you ask, and Whitlock shakes her head.

“Old Blue?” she says, with a blazing grin. “He wants me, but he can't have me. Not so long as the Orphean still flies.”

“Then she'll fly forever,” you say. “I swear to you. I'll do what I have to. I'll keep you all alive.”

Dreams have consequences. Promises have consequences. But a captain has to know which consequences are worth taking, and whatever else you are or mean to become, you'll always be a captain. 

The Orphean will fly. You have no intention of giving death his due, and you are certain – for this is a dream, and you’ve seen visions in moonlight, and you have only ever been yourself – that you have it in you to defy him. You meet Captain Whitlock's eyes, let her see that you have a fire there to match her own. She nods, satisfied, and releases your wrist.

You take the cup. You dream of drinking deep.


End file.
